Tuesday, March 12, 2013

An Updated CAPTCHA Guide: Eradicate the Evil!

*This is an updated version of my popular CAPTCHA post. Much like a virus, every time you adjust to one way of preventing CAPTCHA, Blogger changes its settings. Although to my amazement, Blogger has made the process easier this time.

So here's an updated post on how to turn off CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA

Like many bloggers, if I had to choose between entering CAPTCHA codes when commenting on a dozen blogs and cleaning up an ant infestation in my kitchen, I would much rather go play with my ant friends.

For those unaware of CAPTCHA, it is the word verification that you must enter in order to post a comment on CAPTCHA-enabled Blogger blogs. Until last year, CAPTCHA consisted of one five or six letter word. This relatively simple, albeit annoying, requirement then changed into something far more irritating - a requirement two enter two long words

Now, it's even worse. CAPTCHA requires you to enter one word and three numbers. Moreover, the letters and numbers that you have to copy are almost impossible to read:

At surface level, CAPTCHA seems like a great idea. As it says, it requires you to "prove you're not a robot." Spam sucks, so it's great to have something to prevent it.

But it's not necessary! In the nearly two years that I've run this blog, hardly any spam comments have gotten through Blogger's behind-the-scenes spam filter. Pretty much every blogger I've encountered says the same thing.

If you want to be taken seriously as a blogger, you must get rid of CAPTCHA.

Numerous people refuse to comment on CAPTCHA-enabled blogs. I'm not one of them, but I can't tell you how irritating it is to repeatedly encounter CAPTCHA when I'm doing mass comments on the Follow Friday and In My Mailbox/Stacking the Shelves memes. Often, I comment on 400 blogs over the course of the weekend (Yes, that's right. I don't have a life). The extra second or two required to enter those f*#&$*g codewords adds up quickly.

A lot of people don't even realize that they have CAPTCHA enabled on their blog. So here is a way to check and get rid of it.

1) Go to your dashboard:

2) Click on Settings and then click on Posts and Comments

3) On that page, scroll down until you see Show word verification. Hit the drop down menu next to it and click No. This is the key step!

4) Just above Show Word Verification, go to Comment Modification and click Never.

Presto! You're done. That wasn't so hard was it?

Please, please, please! On behalf of all people who love to comment, I am begging you to get rid of CAPTCHA on your blog. My sanity thanks you.

33 comments:

I love this post... spread the word. Though I have to add that I do moderate comments after 7 days. This is only because if I don't do that I will never know if someone comments on a post from a month ago.. or even a year ago.

I'm probably in the minority of folks that don't care about CAPTCHA one way or the other. My blog, for example, which doesn't have CAPTCHA, was targeted by some kind of spam script that sent 1 spam comment every SECOND! Now, they didn't get through, but the server load because of this was tremendous. Captcha would have eliminated the problem. Ultimately, I went a different route - simply because I found a solution that involved creating a javascript code - but clearly, not everyone would have been able to do that.

I hate captcha so much, but at the same time I've been BOMBARDED with spam comments lately. Literally 15 or so every day for the past couple months, so I can understand the appeal in some ways. My filter catches most of the spam comments, but I still get an email for them which is super irritating. Still, it always takes me at least 2 tries to get the stupid captcha things right.

Love this post! I actually read a week or so ago that it might be going away for good. The average CAPTCHA takes 14 seconds to 'solve' and too many peeps are getting pissy about it losing their time and money because of it. Fingers crossed!

CAPTCHAs are pretty annoying to try to puzzle out, but it doesn't stop me from commenting on blogs. I wouldn't have CAPTCHA on my own, though. You've inspired me to go to my own blog and see if it isn't accidentally turned on! I also had a huge problem with anonymous commenters. I was sad that I had to take away the ability to allow anonymous comments, which I feel occasionally add to discussions, but it's gotten rid of 99% of the spammers. Huzzah!

It still shocks me when I see captcha on a blog. It's SO FLIPPING ANNOYING! And so much of the time I have to enter that darn code over and over again. So if it doesn't take the first time I just click away and am extremely annoyed. I agree, this is NOT necessary! In all my time of blogging I have not had a big issue with spam. For a short while not long ago I was getting quite a bit each day but I would just mark them as spam and after about a week they died out and never came back. I did take off anonymous comments though so that might be helping. I hope people pay attention to this, I HATE captcha!

I read over Parajunkees post on how to remove it and finally did it. I had my mom go to my blog to make sure it worked. I was reading several larger blogs posts about why they don't comment that much because of Captcha